The Goose Man Part 69

"Tell us everything, anything," cried Dorothea, seized with a veritable fit of eagerness to hear him talk. She stretched out her hands toward him: that seemed to him to be so like a child. He had never told stories to a child; he had never in truth told stories to any one. Gertrude and Eleanore had, to be sure, forced a confession or a complaint from him at times, but that was all, and all that was necessary or appropriate.

Suddenly he was drawn on by the word in which his fate would be quietly reflected; by the fiery young eye in the brilliancy of which the complex became simple, the dark bright; by the wicked old man to whom the whole world, as seen from his mire, had become a poisonous food.

And with his brittle, staccato voice he told of the countries through which he had journeyed; of the sea and the cities by the sea; of the Alps and the Alpine lakes; of cathedrals, palaces, and marvellous monasteries; of the queer people he had met, of his work and his loneliness. It was all incoherent, arid, and loveless. Though sorely tempted, he desisted from mentioning things that came close to his soul; things that moved his heart, fired his brain. When he told of the Jewess, the Swallow, he did not even finish the sentence. He made a long pause, and then shifted to the account of his visit to Eschenbach. Here he stopped again before he was through.

But Dorothea began to ask questions. It was all too general and therefore unsatisfactory. "What was there in Eschenbach? Why did you go there?" she asked boldly.

He was in error concerning the hot desire that burned in her eyes to know about Eschenbach. Her question made him feel good; he believed that he was on the scent of warm-heartedness; he thought he had found a soul that was eager to help through knowledge. He was seized with the desire of the mature man to fashion an untouched soul in harmony with the picture of his dreams. "My mother used to live there," he replied hesitatingly, "she has died."

"Yes-and?" breathed Dorothea. She saw that that was not all.

He felt that this uncompromising reticence was not right; he felt a sense of guilt. With still greater hesitation-and immediate repentance-he added: "A child of mine also lived there; she was eleven years old. She has disappeared; no one knows where she is."

Dorothea folded her hands, "A child? And disappeared? Simply vanished?"

she whispered excitedly.

Herr Carovius looked like a man sitting on a hot iron. "Eleven years old?" he asked, hungry for sensation, "why-that was, then-before the time ..."

"Yes, it was before the time," said Daniel gloomily and by way of confirmation. He had betrayed himself, and was angry at himself for having done so. He became silent; it was impossible to get him to say another word.

Herr Carovius noticed how Dorothea hung on Daniel's eyes. A tormenting suspicion arose in him. "Yesterday out on St. Joseph's Place, I was talking with one of your admirers, the fellow who shatters the wings of the stage with his ranting," he began with malice aforethought. "The blade had the nerve to say to me: 'You'd better hurry up and get Dorothea Doderlein a husband, or people will talk their tongues loose in their throats.'"

"That is not true," cried Dorothea indignantly, blushing to the roots of her hair. "He didn't say that."

Herr Carovius laughed malevolently. "Well, if it is not true, it is pretty well put together," he said with his usual bleat.

When Daniel left, Dorothea accompanied him to the outside door.

"It's a pity," murmured Daniel, "a pity!"

"Why a pity? I am free. There isn't a soul in the world who has any claim on me." She looked at him with the courage of a real woman.

"There are remarks that are just like grease spots," he replied.

"Well, who can keep from the dirt these days?" she asked, almost wild with excitement.

Daniel let his eyes rest on her as though she were some material object.

He said slowly and seriously: "Keep your hands and your eyes off of me, Dorothea. I will bring you no happiness."

Her lips opened, thirsty. "I should like to take a walk with you some time," she whispered, and her features trembled with an ecstasy which he was dupe enough to believe was meant for him; in reality Dorothea was thinking of the adventurer and the disclosure of the secret.

"Many years ago," said Daniel, "you will scarcely recall it, I protected you here in this very same gateway from a big dog. Do you remember?"

"No! Or do I? Wait a minute! Yes, I remember, that is, quite indistinctly. You did that?" Dorothea seized his hands with grat.i.tude.

"Fine! Then we will go walking to-morrow morning. Where? Oh, it doesn't make much difference," said Daniel.

"But you must tell me everything, you hear? everything." Dorothea was as insistent as she had been in the room a short while ago; and she was more impetuous and impatient.

They agreed upon the place where they would meet.

XIV

At first they took short walks in remote parts of the city; then they took longer ones. On Mid-Summer Day they strolled out to Kraftshof and the grove of the Pegnitz shepherds. Daniel made unconscious effort to avoid the places where he had once walked with Eleanore.

There came moments when Dorothea's exuberance made him pensive and sad; he felt the weight of his forty years; they were inclined to make him hypochondriacal. Was it the vengeance of fate that made him slow up when they came to a hill, while Dorothea ran on ahead and waited for him, laughing?

She did not see the flowers, the trees, the animals, or the clouds. But when she saw people a change came over her: she would become more active; or she would mobilise her resources; or she seemed to strike up a spiritual liaison with them. It might be only a peasant boy on an errand or a vagabond going nowhere; she would shake her hips and laugh one note higher.

"Her youth has gone to her head, like wine," Daniel thought to himself.

Once she took a box of chocolate bon-bons along. Having had enough of them herself and seeing that Daniel did not care for them, she threw what was left away. Daniel reproached her for her wastefulness. "Why drag it along?" she asked with perfect lack of embarra.s.sment, "when you have enough of a thing you throw it away." She showed her white teeth, and took in one deep breath of fresh air after another.

Daniel studied her. "She is invulnerable," he said to himself; "her power to wish is invincible, her fulness of life complete." He felt that she bore a certain resemblance to his Eva; that she was one of those elves of light in whose cheerfulness there is occasionally a touch of the terrible. He decided then and there not to let mischievous chance have its own way: he was going to put out his hand when he felt it was advisable.

"When are you going to begin to tell me the stories?" she asked: "I must, I must know all about you," she added with much warmth of expression. "There are days and nights when I cannot rest. Tell me! Tell me!"

That was the truth. In order to penetrate his life history, which she pictured to herself as full of pa.s.sionate, checkered events, she had done everything that he had demanded of her.

Daniel refused; he was silent; he was afraid he would darken the girl's pure mind, jeopardise her unsuspecting innocence. He was afraid to conjure up the shadows.

One day she was talking along in her easy way, and while so doing she tripped herself up. She had begun to tell him about the men she had been going with; and before she knew what she was doing, she had fallen into the tone she used when she talked with her Uncle Carovius. Becoming suddenly aware of her indiscretion, she stopped, embarra.s.sed. Daniel's serious questions caused her to make some confessions she would otherwise never have thought of making. She told a goodly number of rather murky and ugly stories, and it was very hard for her to act as though she were innocent or the victim of circ.u.mstances. At last, unable longer to escape from the net she had woven, she made a clean breast of her whole life, painted it all in the gaudiest colours, and then waited in breathless-but agreeable-suspense to see what effect it would have on Daniel.

Daniel was silent for a while; then he made a motion with his outstretched hand as if he were cutting something in two: "Away from them, Dorothea, or away from me!"

Dorothea bowed her head, and then looked at him timidly from head to foot. The decisiveness with which he spoke was something new to her, though it was by no means offensive. A voluptuous shudder ran through her limbs. "Yes," she whispered girlishly, "I am going to put an end to it. I never realised what it all meant. But don't be angry, will you?

No, you won't, will you?"

She came closer to him; her eyes were filled with tears. "Don't be angry at me," she said again, "poor Dorothea can't help it. She is not responsible for it."

"But how did you come to do it?" asked Daniel. "I can't see how it was possible. Weren't you disgusted to the very bottom of your soul? How could you go about under G.o.d's free heavens with such hyenas? Why, girl, the very thought of it fills me with scepticism about everything."

"What should I have done, Daniel?" she said, calling him by his baptismal name for the first time. She spoke with a felicitous mixture of submissiveness and boldness that touched and at the same time enchanted him. "What should I have done? They come and talk to you, and spin their nets about you; and at home it is so dreary and lonely, and your heart is so empty and Father is so mean, you haven't got anybody else in the world to talk to." Such was her defence, effective even if more voluble than coherent.

They walked on. They were pa.s.sing through a valley in the forest. On either side were tall pine trees, the crowns of which were lighted by the evening sun.

"You can't play with Fate, Dorothea," said Daniel. "It does not permit smudging or muddling, if we are to stand the test. It keeps a faultless ledger; the entries it makes on both sides are the embodiment of accuracy. Debts that we contract must always be paid, somehow, somewhere."

Dorothea felt that he was getting started; that the great, good story was about to come. She stopped, spread her shawl on the ground, and took a graceful position on it, all eyes and ears. Daniel threw himself on the moss beside her.

And he told his story-into the moss where little insects were creeping around. He never raised either his eye or his voice. At times Dorothea had to bend over to hear him.

He told about Gertrude, her torpor, her awakening, her love, her resignation. He told about Eleanore; told how he had loved her without knowing it. He told how Eleanore, out of an excess of pa.s.sion and suffering, became his, how Gertrude wandered about dazed, unhappy, lost, until she finally took her life: "Then we went up to the attic, and found it on fire and her lifeless body hanging from the rafter."

He told how Gertrude had lived on as a shadow by the side of Eleanore, and how Eleanore became a flower girl, and how Philippina the inexplicable, and still inexplicable, had come into his family, and how Gertrude's child lived there like an unfed foundling, and how the other child, the child he had had by the maid, had found such a warm spot in his heart.

He told of his meeting the two sisters, their speaking and their remaining silent, his seeing them in secret trysts, the moving about from house to house and room to room, the singing of songs, his experiences with the Dormaul opera company, the light thrown on his drab life by a mask, his friend and the help he had received from him, his separation from him, the brush-maker's house on St. James's Place, the three queer old maids in the Long Row, the days he spent at Castle Erfft, the old father of the two sisters and his strange doings-all of this he described in the tone of a man awakening from a deep sleep.

There was a confidence in what he said and the way he said it that mayhap terrified the hovering spirits of the evening, though it did not fill Dorothea's eyes, then glistening like polished metal, with a more intimate or cordial light.